


We'll Play William Tell

by Edoro



Series: Organized Crimestuck [3]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, F/F, F/M, M/M, Multi, Pale-Black Vacillation, Quadrant Confusion, Racial Tension, Trans Character, quadrant flipping, the revolution will be accidental
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-07-29
Updated: 2012-07-31
Packaged: 2017-11-10 23:40:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/472015
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edoro/pseuds/Edoro
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Karkat Vantas, overworked detective extraordinaire, juggles baffling quadrant vacillation and his job while falling ass-backwards into revolution.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. ==>Karkat: Have unexpected reunion

**Author's Note:**

> More characters, relationships, and tags will be added as the story progresses. I can't promise a regular update schedule but I can promise I'll be working on it regularly.
> 
> Thanks to [roachpatrol](../users/roachpatrol) and [hupsoonheng](../users/hupsoonheng) for beta reading, and [EK (ilyat)](http://archiveofourown.org/users/ilyat) for fact-checking on some pretty major details.

_take your time drawing a bead_  
 _i’ll stand as still as you need_  
 _‘cause you’re so good at talking smack_  
 _you heart attack_  
 _but you’re the apple of my eye anyway_  
 _[-Brand New - You Won’t Know](http://grooveshark.com/s/You+Won+t+Know/2yUdzL?src=5) _

You like Terezi. She’s utterly infuriating and you itch to find just a toe out of line, a hair out of place, so you can haul her off and hand her out the punishment she so richly deserves, but she’s always absolutely immaculate. You can’t help but admire her. Dealing with her is easy, in its own way. You’ll be invited into her office, which will be some dimly lit room in a dimly lit building that absolutely screams _criminal element_. She’ll sit behind a mind-bogglingly pretentious desk and grin at you, leaning over it for extra emphasis, and ask if she can _help_ you, Mr. Vantas?

Then you’ll get down to business, which for the two of you always seems to end up being more of an argument than anything else. You don’t think you’ve ever left a meeting not wanting to strangle her, but you always almost always leave them knowing more than you did before you came, so you figure it balances out. She’s not unhelpful; it’s just that she’s so unbelievably _Pyrope_ she can’t help but be obtuse and obnoxious. You’re not even sure she does it on purpose.

That’s how it’s supposed to go. No muss, minimal fuss, with the both of you having been enriched by the experience. You get her insider’s information on the seedier parts of the city and she gets you conveniently looking the other way when people you know for a fact have been fucking with her turn up full of holes and with bits snapped off.

You’re not sure why you thought it wouldn’t go all wahooni-shaped. The universe takes a particular delight in pissing in your face as often as possible and you really have only yourself to blame for continuously forgetting this fact. You have to admit you didn’t expect it to be quite this way, though.

It takes you half the length of the room to realize that the shadows next to Terezi are a person, another faltering couple of steps to realize who. He’s got his face painted up in this stripey leer that makes it hard to actually see what his mouth is doing, but you can tell he’s just as gobsmacked as you are. The two of you stare at each other over her desk for a long, taut moment. Then he comes sliding out around it with that deceptive speed of his, legs practically as long as you are - he’s grown, some part of you observes inanely, he’s got to have gotten at least another half foot of height since you last saw him - until you’re nose to chest with him.

“ _Karkat_ ,” he says, voice all slow and lazy surprise.

“Gamzee.” He smells just the way he used to. Something squeezes sharply in your chest at that, at the fact that you’re close enough to notice that. You are struck suddenly with the absolutely insane urge to pull him down and rub your cheek against his. Instead you tilt your head back and give him your steeliest upward stare. He looks back down at you with heavily lidded eyes.

“What the fuck is my nubby little brother doing up in a place like this, now?” Gamzee’s voice has the same rhythm it used to, that long lilt that always drove you crazy waiting for him to get to the goddamn point. “A law-abiding kind of motherfucker like what you’ve always been doesn’t seem suited for this kind of wicked shithole.” Up this close you can see his thin lips curving around the words.

“I’m here to talk to Terezi, obviously. The hell are _you_ doing here? Is the Church handing subjugglators out like candy to any shitweasel who cackles loud enough at them, now?” You’re trying very hard not to act like you aren’t completely shaken to see him. It’s happened before, inevitable when you both run in the same areas of the same city, but this is the first time in years the two of you have been face to face. You don’t very much like it; his gaze drapes over you hot and heavy as velvet, pinning you.

“Mr. Makara is my loyal assistant,” Terezi volunteers. She’s still seated comfortably at her desk, feet propped up on it, head cocked towards the two of you - the very picture of vaguely professional irreverence. “He has been serving me very faithfully of his volition and is in no way encouraged or endorsed by his religion! He is encouraged and endorsed only by me.”

You guess it’s only natural that the two biggest pains in your ass would team up. “That’s just great. Nice to see you again, Gamzee, by the way. You’re looking as bugfuck insane as usual.”

He laughs and drops a heavy paw on your shoulder, nails curling into your skin. “And you are looking like a stone-cold boring-ass motherfucker who is ten kinds of all blind to the miracles of everything around him, just like as usual.”

You are deeply displeased with how much he’s touching you. “And Pyrope over there is a lunatic as always, so I guess it’s business as usual. Do me a favor and get back behind the desk, chucklefuck, and try looking with your eyes.”

“I don’t think,” he says very slowly, “that you are quite at understanding with your position here. I think a brother has gotten it up in his motherfucking thoughts that maybe he can be telling me what to do.” 

Here is what you’ve been waiting for: the flash of cruel arrogance, laid out as carelessly indolent as everything else he ever does. It’s a reminder that this isn’t the boy you used to love, but something awful that rose up wet and glistening from the sad shed husk of his body.

Gamzee doesn’t scare you, with his looming height and greasepaint leer, not after you spent your entire childhood around painted faces and the wicked pictures slopped up on half the walls. Subjugglators have always unsettled you, though, and that’s only gotten worse as you’ve gotten older. You are heretically familiar with the most intimately dirty little secrets of the Church, and those are all you can think about whenever you see one of the Messiahs’ devotees. You look at them, all wrath and whimsy, and you just think about how Gamzee used to be. It makes you sad, mostly.

You reach up and plant your hands on his chest, pushing him back. “I think you sure as hell don’t have any right to put your grubby hands anywhere on my body. I’m here to deal with Pyrope, not you, so just go back to being a good pet psychopath and let the adults talk.”

He grabs you by the collar. He actually grabs the actual collar of your shirt and pulls you up off the ground, bending to snarl into your face, every trace of sleepiness gone from his eyes. “I think this motherfucker here don’t got any right to be snapping any order sounds at me, not after what he up and fucking did. I think this brother here owes some motherfuckers in this room a righteous motherfucking _apology_ before he gets to go on and get doing any business done.”

You hope that it’s possible to explode from sheer mortified rage and that both of these assholes get maimed by the shrapnel. “ _I_ need to apologize? For what? For you being pan-fucked crazy? For finally getting tired of throwing myself up against a wall every damn day and wondering at the end of it why I was so bruised and sore? I’m sorry I’m not crazy, Gamzee! I’m sorry I finally realized that if I kept doing the same shitty, useless thing over and over again it wouldn’t suddenly have different results! I’m sorry you’re the most odious pile of troll-shaped excrement I’ve ever met and I’m sorry I ever thought you were anything else. How’s that?”

You’ve wanted to actually say these things to his face for so long. The two of you fought awfully, viciously, squabbling at each other like half-mad dogs, but you never really got down to the heart of it. You never got around to saying how he’d hurt you, never gotten to lance that particular boil. He’d looked at you and all your love and all the devotion you’d given him in the one hand, and the slimy barbs of the Church burrowing themselves under his skin in the other and picked _them_.

The fact that Terezi’s listening, though, makes it more humiliating than cathartic. You don’t want to air your dirty laundry out like this. Your soiled garments are top secret goddamn business and someone like her has no right to poke her snout into them.

“Oh, is that what you’re saying happened? Is that how this brother spins it to himself? Look at the lies he tells, look at all the wicked untruths coming from this brother’s little teeth-hole, hear how motherfucking flagrant they are in their falsehood!” Gamzee curls down around you so his mouth is near your ear, breath puffing cool against your skin. “Let me tell you, my most beloved brother, of how these things really went. Let me motherfucking _tell_ in your aural spongeclots here of the truth you did to me.”

“Oh, please, Gamzee, I would love nothing more than to hear whatever twisted, flimsy piece of bullshit excuse you have for what happened. I am jerking my bulge raw here with anticipation. _Tell_ me.” The terrible urge to reach up and stroke his face rises inside of you. You push it savagely back down, hands remaining limp and open at your sides. 

Gamzee pitches his voice soft and just the right kind of low so it buzzes in your horns and teeth and down your spine. It’s disgustingly intimate. You can practically feel his lips moving.

“You left me,” he says, raw with simple grief. “You up and fuck and left me, my brother. You made all these righteous pale promises unto me, you made your motherfucking _troth_ to me, and then you showed me your motherfucking heel dust and that was that. Eight and a half sweeps we were together, and every second of it I loved you with every splinter of bone and drop of blood inside my own sorry carcass. I’ve got your mark carved in me true as every gospel I ever up and did hear, paid all in pain and blood to show the truth of how I love you, and then you fucking _split_.” As he goes on, his voice goes rougher, deeper, harsh now with anger. “Fucking split and before that you spewed out of your face all these wicked heresies, all this most offensive bullshit I have never wanted to hear, and I abided by that for the sake of how much I motherfucking loved you, but what even was the point? This brother had no love in his heart for me, not enough as he said he did, so what did I get? Just some hurt, that’s all. That’s what you motherfucking _did_.”

For a moment you are actually struck completely dumb with shock, and then a slow, rising fury. It burns up through you until you’re sure you’ll just fall to ashes out of his hold, spontaneously rage-combust right here in the office. “How can you even try to say I didn’t love you? You left me to go gallivanting off with your clownfuck buddies and get yourself mutilated a new way every week and you didn’t even _care_ about me, not when you had the dogfucking _Church_. I mean, Gamzee, come on, how many times did you leave me sitting there twiddling my thumbs up my asshole while you were gone learning whatever excuse for holy truth they were calling this month’s torture session?”

He got religion and didn’t love you anymore. There wasn’t room for Karkat in him anymore, not with the Messiahs and their teachings. Not with all the violence he had to learn. They took out every sweet thing in him you’d ever pitied and stuffed the empty skin-sack left with straw, and then tried to hand him back to you.

You had never asked him to choose. You _could_ never ask him to choose, wouldn’t even think of trying to make him do that. 

You hadn’t needed to.

“I left because you weren’t _you_ anymore, you egregious screwup. I was pale for Gamzee Makara, not some abhorrent subjugglator shitfountain who pranced around giggling through pools of the blood of his inferiors, singing murder carols and popping earth-shattering boners over some new form of self-inflicted torture. You’re the one who made that choice, alright? I understand, though, it wasn’t like you could be two places at once. You just picked which one had your loyalties.”

You try not to sound bitter and utterly fail.

The two of you fall silent now, staring at each other, flushed with ragged emotion. You realize, very suddenly, that you hate him. You hate what he is. You hate the fact that you used to love him and he let that godawful Church take everything good about him away. You hate yourself for ever having loved him and now you hate yourself for hating him, because you know that you should pity the twisted fucking wreckage of what used to be your moirail, but you can’t dredge up even a drop. It’s all contempt all the way down.

You reach up and cup one hand around the side of his face, thumb smudging along the familiar curve of his cheekbone. It feels like watching your house burn down. “You are fucking awful in every way it is possible for a person to be awful and a few that I think you invented specially just to make me angry.”

He bites the pad of your thumb in return and darts in to smash his mouth into yours when you yelp and yank your hand away. It’s the worst kiss you’ve ever had in recent memory and possibly the entire rest of your life, too. It’s all teeth clacking and lips getting smashed and bitten and tongues pushing hard in where they don’t belong, heavy and cold and invasive. 

Your blood is rushing in your ears, but you’re dimly aware of Terezi crowing delightedly behind the both of you. You flip her the bird and then set your claws into Gamzee’s shoulders, raking both sets down his back. He groans into your mouth and drops you, swooping down to catch your lips again while his hands wrap around your waist.

He’s _stupidly_ bigger than you. His fingers very nearly meet across your back and he’s bent practically in half to reach your mouth. You’re wrapped all up in him like this, Gamzee curled around and above you. You feel unpleasantly caught, like a fly who just buzzed into one of the pitcher plant’s walls. 

You’re the one who pulls back first, suddenly remembering that you’re here to do a _job_ , not lick your blood off some asshole’s teeth. Gamzee tries to come after you, yanking you back in close when you try to step away. Apparently the concept of ‘no’ isn’t something he ever picked up. The two of you push and tug and scuffle against each other. You bite at his shoulder and then you’re kissing again, his hands fisted in your hair, and that hold you manage to drop out of, backing away quickly to put the chair between you. 

“Look, we can go have a lovely candle-lit hatedate later, okay? I have business right now and it’s kind of more important.”

He’s an absolute wreck. His makeup is smeared halfway down his neck, the careful designs a twisted mess of indefinite grey, his mouth is dripping red and purple from needle teeth and torn lips. You want nothing more than to push him up against the nearest wall and tear his throat out with your teeth; from the way his lips curl back when he meets your eyes, he feels about the same.

Finally, Terezi remembers that she is nominally a respectable businesswoman. “That’s enough, boys.” The amusement in her voice is clear. Fucking vulture. “Come back here, Gamzee, we have work that must be attended to, and none of it is located in Mr. Vantas’ tonsils.”

He slinks back to her side all sulky and sullen, licking your blood off his lips. “Then get done your motherfucking business, sister.”

You perch ramrod straight in the seat in front of her desk, glutes parked on the very edge of it, ready to jump up and leave in a second. Removed now from the immediacy of Gamzee’s mouth and hands on you, you mostly just want to haul ass out of there. You’ll take a quick and briskly efficient exchange of information as a barely suitable second.

The conversation isn’t even long enough to properly distract you. It’s a pretty simple thing, all said. There’s Alternian Imperial military technology being smuggled into the city, somehow; while anyone with a warehouse full of bioweapons should be as obvious as a fluorescent target three blocks wide, you can’t find them. Every single trail has gone dead cold as soon as you got much beyond the individual distributors, all of whom pointed you in conflicting directions that led nowhere. If there’s anyone here who would know who’s doing it, it’s Terezi Pyrope.

She doesn’t. Not even significant pause doesn’t, just flat out doesn’t. She gets edgy about it too, frowning when you tell her exactly the kind of shit that’s been turning up and settling back in her chair, fingers steepled, all business.

“How would they even get on-planet?” she wants to know. You can only shrug helplessly. The only Alternian ships allowed through the blockade are the biannual droneships that collect genetic material for the home planet’s Mother Grub, and even those are unmanned now after the first few waves were shot down on approach. Humanity’s stranglehold on this planet and its starspace is nigh impenetrable. “Could it be vets pawning off their old war memorabilia? I don’t doubt there are many wiley oldsters who refused to hand over their weapons as per the treaty! Trolls are a notoriously ill-behaved lot.”

You’re shaking your head before she’s even done. “No, we know what some veteran’s burnt-out old pea-shooter looks like. This is all really new. It’s top of the line stuff. If the Imperial cavalry came trumpeting in tomorrow and executed every hornless mammalsack on the planet, this is what they’d be using to do it.”

She nods along slowly as you speak, lips pursed. “I thought so. Sorry to disappoint you, but I haven’t heard anything about lawless weapons smugglers. A lady keeps better company than that!”

You roll your eyes so hard it almost makes you dizzy. “Well, thank you for having been absolutely useless. Keep me posted, I guess.” As frustrating as it is to have one of your more promising info-wells turn up dry, it’s at least a comfort that you know she’ll tell you if she finds anything. Crowing maniac coyote though she may be, the two of you have an easy understanding.

It would take a few rounds of hardcore trepanation to make you feel halfway okay about turning your back on Gamzee to leave. You leave the room with the dumb lizard brain at the base of your spine shrieking bowel-voiding terror at you the whole time, but he stays right where he is. You make a point of not looking over your shoulder once you’re out of the room and allow yourself a slow sigh once you’ve cleared the hallway.


	2. ==>Karkat: Go home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things get a little steamy up ahead here! I can't necessarily promise this is the only sex scene, but the fic's not going to be full of them where they aren't relevant.
> 
> Thanks to everyone who's given kudos or commented. It really helps encourage me to work hard and I hope you enjoy upcoming chapters.
> 
> Also, since it's become relevant, [here](http://edoro.tumblr.com/post/24986459129/who-wants-a-big-troll-gender-post-too-bad) is a link to a post on my tumblr about the troll sex and gender headcanons I'm working with in this fic.

_hey hey hey_  
 _mr hangman_  
 _go get your rope_  
 _-Brand New - You Won’t Know_

Terezi always brings you to the nicest places. Downstairs, the club is mostly empty, and without a screen of smoke and chatter and moving bodies, you can see just how shabby it is. The lushly upholstered couches scattered throughout the room are pitted with stains and frayed around the bottoms, the woodwork and paneling all grimy and splintered. The less said about the carpet, the better. 

One of the many unpleasant side effects of working with humans is that you’ve had to drag your circadian rhythm kicking and screaming into diurnality, so it’s late for you and early for everyone else. The club isn’t even technically open, but apparently Terezi has personal connections at seedy drug dens and gets VIP treatment. 

When you walk by the bouncer on your way out, she doesn’t even try to cover her yawn. You’re deep in the slums, where nothing even thinks about opening before sunset. The city is sluggishly crawling to life, caught right in that eerie place between day-sleeping and nighttime activity, none of the soft-lit signs flickering on yet and hardly anyone moving through the streets. Like the club, bareness doesn’t suit them.

This is the kind of place your coworkers take an hour getting to when calls come in, where you don’t even breathe a whisper of _cop_ unless you want to wake up sandwich-meat in someone’s questionable deli. The windows are all bricked in or boards nailed up over trashbags, ugly bruised eyes staring sullenly out into the twisting little alleyways. Left to their own devices, trolls build like ants, all organic and round and in twisty warrens. You know for a fact there are miles upon miles of illicit tunnels underneath all these squat tenements, although only when you’re out of uniform.

Technically, tunneling is illegal. There’s a sinkhole in these areas practically every month, a cave-in every week. The official solution is to stop living like stupid fucking bugs and get a proper apartment; the actual solution is that no one really gives a fuck if a few trolls bury themselves alive. Every so often, your toes catch on the crumbling lip of a depression in the sidewalk where someone dug a little too high and you wonder how many more pedestrians it’ll be before it gives. Or maybe it already did. Who the hell knows?

You keep your head down and shoulders up until you get out of that area, into sections of the city where the buildings have windows and there are street lights. Those sting your eyes something fierce. The sudden pools of brightness are worse than the grinding ache of daylight, which you at least don’t have to constantly keep readjusting to. It’s at least better than worrying you’re going to get pegged for a cop and end up in a brawl. 

Here’s another thing to add to the list of reasons why Karkat Vantas is a miserable shit-tick latched hideous mouthparts first in the fetid anal cavity of the world: he doesn’t even fit in with his own goddamn species anymore.

You can, however, spot a tail. Especially when they make roughly shit-all attempts to not get spotted, and especially when they keep flinching away from all the streetlights and bright neon store-windows like a troll who’s clearly never been into the squishier parts of the city. You catch a wavery silhouette of long, twisting horns in a department store window and just barely keep from huffing a sigh, but stop trying to lose him.

Your apartment’s nothing special: a mid-rise building stuffed in among a bunch of other ones in the area of town where most places have Alternian in the window as well as English and keep the lights down low. Decent local business dot the street, squeezed in among the apartments. You lean up against the door and wait for your tail to catch up, absently rattling your keyring as he mounts the steps.

“You’re going to absolutely ruin my reputation, you know,” you tell him as you let the both of you in. The lobby has those low-wattage, softly yellow bulbs that cast muted shadows everywhere and paint everything delicately orange. You could just kiss whoever invented them. “The neighbors are going to see me bringing home strange stray clowns and go out and buy new locks en masse, and every night they’ll whisper the mantra of plummeting property values to themselves as they do up all five deadbolts: What’s happening to this neighborhood?” 

It hurts your throat to get your voice so flat and nasal, silencing all but your middle echo box and thrum cords, but you think it’s worth it for the best damn human impression you’ve ever heard. Gamzee blurts a throaty chuckle.

“Ain’t no neighbors up to be seeing, it looks like.” He’s gazing around avidly like he’s never seen the inside of a building before. You guess it’s not implausible that he hasn’t, really. Subjugglators live with the Church, traditionally, and you have no idea what kind of hole Terezi keeps her lair in.

He’s proven shortly wrong. You two get up to the fifth floor and then have to do the traditional awkward elevator dance in order to let in one of your more bearable neighbors, an older human who lives on his own and brings you over food sometimes. He nods at you and then, after a long and hesitant glance, at Gamzee.

Half of your neighbors are trolls. The rest are a mix of humans too poor to live in the segregated parts of the city and humans who think living with trolls makes them cool. There’s a group of three human college students who live right next to the elevator who play old Alternian propagandoperas all night long and embarrass themselves trying to sing along if they’re drunk enough. 

Gamzee stands himself in the middle of your living room like a watchtower and peers around, all the little red electronic lights glimmering wetly off his eyes. You’ve given him your back the whole way here, but you feel nervous about it now when you go to flip the kitchen light on. It’s dim enough to barely lighten up the living room’s edges, but he squints a little against it anyway. You wonder if he’s ever really seen someone’s living space like this. As part of their doctrine of shittiness on earth, the mirthful faithful take bare stone rooms deep in the Church’s bowels. You have to at least give them grudging credit for making things nearly as bad for themselves as they do for everyone else. If you’re going to be stupid, you always figure you might as well be stupid in as many directions as possible.

He’s just standing there and you don’t have the faintest piss trickle of an idea what to do. You expected him to be on you in the elevator for sure, or maybe even the first conveniently dark street corner or handy alley, and you sure as hell didn’t think you’d get further than opening the door before you had seven feet of clowndouche pawing at you.

“Hey, shitheel, are you just gonna stand there like disgusting polka-dotted furniture all night?” You’re trying really hard not to think about how for a second he looks just like he used to, all long and gawky and endlessly curious. “What the hell would I even do with a clown, anyway? I guess I could stick a lampshade on your horns and tell people you’re some pretentious modern artist’s latest bilesack spasm, but you clash with my couch and you’d scare all the bitches away. At least sit down or something, come on, you’re going to scrape the ceiling.”

He folds into an inelegant sprawl across your couch, elbow up on one armrest and calves dangling off the other one. “Figured I oughta up and wait for a motherfucking invitation. Since it’s your digs and all. Nice motherfuckin’ place, by the way, my brother. Didn’t figure it’d be so nice on the inside from how gnarly the outside bits all are.”

You almost snap back ‘you mean because it’s in the troll side of town?’ and then remember that Gamzee isn’t any of your dickweed coworkers. “Yeah, it’s pretty sweet. Rent’s cheap as fuck, too, because of all the undesirables living around here.”

He nods along like he even knows a fucking thing about rent or slums or the way that guy you’d brought home from the bar last week had flinched in on himself and tried to hide in his coat right up until you two were in your bedroom. You hadn’t even been able to summon up more than some tired old contempt, hadn’t said anything. Later, though, when he’d left, you’d gone still sore to the girl next door you think you might be pale for and said, all venom, _fucker wants alien ass but he doesn’t want to be seen with one, isn’t that just like them._

You wonder if Gamzee’s ever even met a human. You’re sure Terezi does plenty of business with them, but you have no idea how long he’s been her lap lunatic. You wonder if he’s ever had one ask if it’s true how tight they say troll pussy is. You wonder if anyone’s ever looked at Gamzee Makara, seven feet if he’s an inch, eyes popping sickly deep orange out of his white-painted face, all snagglefangs hanging over his lip and sharp curving claws, and called him a fucking bug.

Very abruptly you hate him so much it’s like bile, like the scalding acid dribble of retching on an empty stomach. Your entire thorax burns with loathing for the walking chancre stretched across your couch like he owns it, nodding along with you like he has even the first glimmer of an idea about anything.

“I’d love to keep chatting with you about the property values, there’s really nothing more interesting and I’m sure you’d have just some delightful insights to provide, but I’ve actually got what we in the business refer to as _a job_ and I can’t be entertaining your dumb ass all night, so if you don’t have anything you want to say, show yourself the door.” Your voice is tight with anger. 

You advance on him as you speak until you’re standing right above him. He smiles up like he doesn’t even care and grabs you around the hips, tugging you in a slow tumble to rest against his body. “I don’t know that I’ve got any shit to really be saying to a brother, but I do think there’s being some things feel right up inside my chest pump to be _doing_ to him.”

He hooks a leg over yours and kisses you. It’s gentle, a soft slow press of dry, closed lips. It’s _pale_ and so chaste that for a second the idea of taking it any further is unspeakably obscene. Then you bite him and the cool spill of his blood over your tongue snaps you out of it. All the ghosts of tenderness in you sublimate to fury, the hot burning kind that makes you want to rip him open and claw his entrails out. 

You settle for biting him so savagely your teeth meet with a dull click through his lip. He digs his claws in where they’re cupping your hips and moans, the sound unrolling long and low from his throat, and bites back.

The two of you kiss like a snake fight. It’s barely not a crudely over-exaggerated mimicry of black affections, barely not a dirty joke, but you’re just so _angry_. You want to flay him raw and bare down to the bone until you’ve cut out every inch of the boy you used to love, and then you want to fuck the piecemeal monster left until you both combust from chafing.

You very quickly come to the unfortunate conclusion that despite the fact that you’re on top of him, he’s the one in control here. It was stupid to let him get ahold of you like this; your arms are pinned awkwardly between the two of you and you can barely move them. You sort of scrabble uselessly at his chest, while he’s free to grab at any part of you he can reach. He pushes one hand up underneath your shirt and rakes his claws down your back, drawing up hot stinging lines of welts. The other one is wiggling under the waistband of your pants, bony fingers getting well acquainted with your ass.

You rear back, swallowing back a surprised gasp. “Whoa there, what the fuck do you think you’re doing with that hand?”

Gamzee stares at you like you just asked him to shove a live hamster up his waste chute. “I think I’m grabbing up on your paltry ass offerings here, brother.”

“ _Paltry_?” Your ass has been called a lot of things, but _paltry_ has never been one of them. In fact, generally it would be the exact opposite. If anyone asked you - which they never do - you’d say it was _toned_ or _chiseled_ or maybe even just _unbelievably magnificent_. “You are actually literally a walking skeleton whose ass-lack defies geometry and anatomy, so I really don’t think you have room to be calling anyone’s ass paltry, much less as amazing a specimen as the one you’ve currently got your disgusting grasping appendages clamped non consensually onto.”

“Bro,” he says, rolling the word slow in his mouth. “Brother of mine, you let me up inside of your digs and then got all down on my level here and then you have been kissing me right on the motherfucking mouth like maybe you wanna crawl down my throat-hole for the last five minutes, and while all of this most righteous fucking makeout noise is been going on you been grinding your hips on me like your bulge is gonna fall off if you don’t. I don’t think you have call to jaw about me grabbing on your ass is _non consensual_ here, anymore.”

“Okay, one, fuck you, kissing you doesn’t mean you can touch any other part of me. Two, there is a line, okay? Pants are a line, Gamzee, and you crossed it.” He gets this look like he wants to start being unruly about it, so you place one finger gently across his lips. “No, hush, I’m talking and when I do that you open up your stunted aural flaps and listen, okay? I don’t know about you, but I don’t like to bring home every random shit-tick who I meet and dislike and fuck them on my couch that night. Not everyone is a hopped-up bucketslut ready to slobber all over the crusted, weeping bulge-sores of everyone who waxes a little pitch his way.”

He growls and snaps at your finger. “So what, you don’t wanna fuck with me? Gonna try and front to me like you aren’t thinking real hard about how close up and personal our motherfucking respective anatomies could get? Is that how we’re playing now, my nubbin, with all lies and being hard to get? You wanna get _chased_ , is that it?”

Your stomach does a slow flip over at the thought of him hunting after you. The worst part is how you can’t tell if the idea scares you more than it turns you on or not. “I’m not playing hard to get, you feculent fuckface. I’m just saying maybe I don’t want your hands down my pants right at this second, which I think is a reasonable request considering we’ve been reacquainted for less than twenty-four goddamn hours and you’re already careening past third base after a few kisses. What’s the deal there, anyway, Bozo? I thought you guys were all about the celibacy.”

Which makes you remember that, oh yeah, they _are_. Thinking about it too hard makes you feel almost queasy. You hadn’t forgotten, exactly, but you haven’t really thought about it in a while, either.

He shrugs. “Just because I don’t get all caught up in base body urges like you don’t mean I don’t still wanna get all intimate up with a brother here, you know? Got some all kinds of powerful motherfucking feelings in my chest pump for you, and you know as I ain’t ever been good with putting that shit in words. So why not let our bodies talk instead? Says the same shit.”

You open your mouth to say something really scathing, something like _Squeezing my ass isn’t exactly the height of romantic sentiment_ , but what comes out instead is, “I don’t know how I feel about you.”

For the first time since that first moment when he realized who you were, he looks startled. You like it on him. He’s been putting on faces, but this just looks bare and honest. It makes him look more like himself.

“I mean, you are completely, utterly loathsome, don’t get me wrong. You’re an infected bedsore on life’s corpulent asscheek and you have one of the most uniquely punchable faces I’ve ever seen, second only to this shitbag social worker who I see sometimes. But I just.” You try to get your thoughts organized enough to make sense. “A minute ago I was trying to chew off your face and that was great, I sincerely enjoyed that, I’d like to do more of it, and then I was about half a second away from honest-to-god papping you to make you shut up, and you’re just. Fucking confusing. Okay?”

You always thought that quadrant-flipping was an easy thing. They always write it like it is, in all the movies and shows and novels you’ve ever seen. One day you’re drowning in pity for each other and the next you’re stupid with hate, and there’s never any miserable backwashing confusion. 

Right now, you want to stroke Gamzee’s face. The way his cheek feels under your palm is embedded so deeply in your muscle memory that if you could reproduce, your descendants would be born remembering it. You can close your eyes and feel the edge of his jaw, the jut of his cheekbone, the delicate little indent of his eyesocket. Your fingers know all his contours. You ache to touch him.

You also want to grab him by the horns and slam his head into a wall a couple dozen times and then kiss him until you’re dizzy.

He looks perplexed and halfway to lost. The way his brow wrinkles up brings back memories of patiently re-explaining the latest schoolfeeding lesson to him until he got it. God help you, you want to kiss his forehead smooth.

Gamzee’s never had the patience for complicated, as far as feelings go. He’s never been able to just sit and suss out all the nuance in a big tangle of emotions and he’s never wanted to, never had the urge to do anything but turn tail the second something got difficult to feel. You’re the one who always did the heavy lifting in that area.

“Sounds like you’re pretty salty at me,” he offers, slow like he doesn’t quite know the words he wants to say. “Sounded like you were pretty salty at me all earlier, too, even though you’re the motherfucker as up and fucking split as soon as he could. Everything seems all nice and easy black here.”

You can’t decide if you’re grateful or furious for the way that offhand comment makes you want to shake him. “Oh, go fellate a chainsaw. I wouldn’t have left if you hadn’t already long since given me up in favor of your awful circus gods. Did you really expect me to just stay around and shackle myself to someone who didn’t _want_ me?”

“I never didn’t want you,” he says. It’s like a dirge. He leans his forehead against yours and closes his eyes and says it like it hurts to say. “Never have I not wanted you. Brother, beloved, _never_ has there been any single shred of my soul or carcass that wasn’t filled to the brim and spilling over with wanting for you. We are meant to motherfucking be, don’t you all see it? Don’t you got this knowing? So much have I never not wanted you that even after all these sweeps of the bitterest fucking feelings in my heart for you, I still want you. I still love you, it’s just all blackways now. Simplest fucking thing.”

It’s not, but you don’t say that. Instead, you shift until you can get both hands around his neck, elbows leaning on his chest, and kiss him while you squeeze. Your thumbs fit in the hollow of his throat like it was made for them. His whole body fits against yours like it was made for you. Gamzee Makara is a glove you were built to wear.

He sighs until you cut his air off, thumbs pressing brutally down. His eyes roll back and he squirms against you, fingers digging in on your back and ass until finally it’s too much and he reaches up to claw at your arms. You let up when he starts yanking on your wrists.

“I hate it when you talk,” you say, and bear down again. This is simple. The way his pulse hammers under your fingers, the way his body bucks desperately against you, the press and flex of your hands; these are all things you understand. You know just where to press and how long to do it and how long to let up for so that he can’t ever quite catch his breath.

When you finally really stop, his face is flushed so deeply purple it’s nearly eggplant and he’s practically sobbing as he breathes, dragging in ragged, gasping gulps of air. His throat is already bruising a mottled navy that you’re sure is going to look beautifully obscene tomorrow. 

“See?” he rasps. His voice is magnificently wrecked. “Easiest fucking thing.”

“I still want you to shut up.” You rest your forehead against his and close your eyes. If it weren’t for the heady reek of caliginous pheromones wreathing the two of you - mostly yours; he smells more tepid and slightly inconvenienced than hot and bothered - you could almost imagine, just for a second, that everything is normal. “Come on, let’s go to my room. I have an amazing track record of not banging anyone on my living room couch, because I am not a constantly intoxicated fratfuck too shamefully incompetent to stumble to my respiteblock while taking my clothes off. You’re staying the night,” you add as you lead him down the short hallway. “That’s non-negotiable.”

“Got work to do, bro.” He pushes past you into your block, pulling his shirt off over his head and tossing it across the room. There are new scars on his back, hatching like rope climbing the length of his spine and curving around to cup his hips. Before you can get a better look, he drops onto your concupiscent couch. 

“So call Terezi and tell her she needs to do her own heavy lifting for a night.” You pointedly drop your own shirt right next to the couch and kneel between his invitingly spread knees.. “She’s a big kid, I think she’ll be okay. _Or_ put your clothes back on and get the hell out. Your choice.”

“Can’t really be getting up, can I? I got this brother all the fuck here up in my lap holding me down.” He gives a one-shouldered shrug and settles back, looking you over in the most blatantly appraising way.

You reach out and run a finger along his clavicle, down his chest, scraping with just the edge of your nail. You trace along the old lavender scars of his moirail markings, following them as they curve along the rounded edge of his breast. You’ve always thought the scars looked better on him than you, always admired the graceful way they bend and curl with his body as opposed to the flat planes of your own chest. 

The scars are smoother now than they were when you knew them, but it’s otherwise just the same. Your sign still glares out from the center of it, impossibly bright as always. 

You press your hands flat to his stomach and slide them up, fingers spread to touch as much skin as possible. His tits are a bare handful each, firm and soft-skinned, and when you squeeze them he sighs, head dropping back. You dart in to kiss his exposed throat and then stay there, nipping and sucking at the bruised flesh, feeling every noise he makes under your lips. 

The two of you learn each other’s bodies all over again, like a new dialect of a familiar language. It’s slower than before, if not much gentler, all pricking claws and teeth and digging fingers into muscle. He’s obscenely good at hurting you just the way you like it, hot and sudden and then soothing over it with careful pleasure until you can bear to be hurt again; you’re kind of pissed at how quick he picks you up.

For his part, he’s easy to please and obnoxiously vocal when you get it right. You bite his neck and he moans, dig your claws into the slope of his breast and he whines, drag your nails down his side and he arches, gasps when you go over his vestigial gills. All he wants is for it to hurt, so while he learns to pluck intricate melodies of pain and pleasure from your nerves, you find and tear into all his soft spots.

This time, when he gets a hand down the back of your pants, you don’t argue. Cool fingers slide over your heated skin, running over the curve of your ass and then slipping between your legs. He strokes the slit of your nook, careless claws pricking at the tissue thin skin, pushing one fingertip in just deep enough to tease. You push back, seeking deeper contact.

“Do it _right_ if you’re going to,” you growl, punctuating the statement with a savage bite to his shoulder. 

Gamzee laughs and pulls his hand out, but not before giving your ass a firm squeeze. “I see you haven’t gotten one tiny motherfuckin’ jot more patient, bro.” His deft fingers make quick work of your button and zipper. You stand up to shimmy out of your pants, reaching for his solely out of habit. It isn’t until they’re halfway down his thighs you remember there’s no point. By then you’ve committed yourself, and damned if you’re going to let him watch you squirm.

The spare simplicity of it defies how violent it really was. Right now all you see is grey skin stitched together, the lips of his seedflap closed tight like that’s all there was to it, with no hint of the brutality of torn and bleeding flesh. No one looking at him from the outside like this could tell they carved him empty as a cluckbeast fit for stuffing and then ripped him open, sewed him back up and tried to give him back like that made him whole again. 

You run a finger slowly along the line of stitches, tracing careful angles across his closed slit. The skin there is flushed, stitches pulling taut as his body tries to react. “This is still completely disgusting, you know.”

“Ain’t no one said you gotta rest your peepers on it.” He hooks a leg around your waist and nudges you back in closer. “Ain’t no one ever said you gotta do nothing but have some basic motherfucking respect up in yourself for practices what some motherfuckers may be finding sacred truth in, which means if you got salty thoughts about it you just up and keep your cute fucking little mouth shut.” Slowly, almost reverently, he runs his thumb over your cheekbone, down the side of your face, and along your jaw, pressing it gently against your lips. “Don’t make that heretic noise at me, brother, I do not anymore have a shred of patience for it in me. I’ll rip up out your teeth and feed ‘em to you if you do it, you feel me?”

His eyes bore into you, heavy-lidded and intense. In the darkness of your respiteblock his pupils are big enough to drown in, black holes drilled into the faintly luminescent sclera. His other hand is creeping, spiderlike, up your leg again, claws scratching. You break his gaze when you drop to your knees, mindless of the accidental furrows he claws into your thigh.

“Sure, I think I can get basic fucking respect down.” Up close it’s even worse. Up close you can see the needle scars and the little divots around the stitches where the skin has stretched from years of being pulled tight and just how tight the stitches are, how stiff and unyielding, how deeply they’re digging into his skin. You can’t look at it without remembering the full day he spent in bed, reeking of blood and out of his pan with pain.

You lean in and drag your tongue right up along the middle of his seedflap. The stitches aren’t as rough as you thought; they’re sort of slick, almost metallic, cool little speedbumps. He doesn’t quite shiver but shifts, slouching down and spreading his knees out, hand settling back against the side of your head. One thumb curls around your horn. 

You look up from between his legs and meet a look of easy contempt. Like the idea of you debased is so natural loathing you for it is an afterthought. You bare your teeth back at him and bite into the meat of his thigh until his knees squeeze your shoulders. When he relaxes, you start licking again, slow even strokes over his mutilated crotch while his blood smears into your cheek. 

Every inch of him is familiar to you already, but you map it all over again, learn the way he flushes under your mouth, the little jumping muscles of his legs, the bare arch of tendon where his inner thigh and groin meet. You taste every stitch like you’re Terezi and he’s a crayon factory. You lick and suck and nip at him until he’s tipped back in a shuddering line on the couch, legs wrapped around you and toes curling so hard his toenails dig feathery scratches into your back. He tries to rock his hips up against your mouth and you push him down, grind the heel of each palm down onto his protruding hipbones and hold him, and scrape your teeth down the line of stitches.

He twists like he’s trying to snap himself in half and clocks you in the side of the face with a knee, gasping out a breathless shout. You pull back, fighting against his hands in your hair yanking your head back forward, until he’s gone still again. It’s a trembling stillness, the taut quiet of anticipation. He’s flushed all the way down his chest and tense with need for you, _shaking_ with need for you.

You rise up and settle back into his lap, leaning in to bite his neck while your bulge squirms against his stomach. Pressing just a little more against him makes the friction even sweeter. You groan into his throat and rock, driving your hips forward in tight little circles. 

“Motherfucker,” he growls, voice drawn too tight with need to be as threatening as he’s trying for. “I don’t see as you’re fucking done.”

“You’re _celibate_ , you festering puddle of vomit. Not my fault you decided to scoop your fun parts out and take a vow of non-concupiscence, but I’m pretty sure it means I’d be majorly disrespecting your asshole clown gods if I got you off and we don’t want that, right?” The look of choked fury on his face is the most delicious thing you’ve seen all goddamn month. You want to bottle it. “So how about you make yourself useful and focus on the guy who didn’t make all those unfathomably stupid decisions and therefore has both complete license to fuck whoever he wants _and_ a bulge to enjoy it with?”

To illustrate, you grab one of his hands and pull it between your legs, bulge twisting around his wrist. Finally getting some pressure on your nook is a relief; you sag against his hand, grinding down in shallow thrusts while you rake your nails down his sides. He stays sulkily still for long enough you almost start to worry, and then you catch two claws in a gillslit. His whole body gives a spastic jerk, like he touched a live wire, and he whines. You do it again, dragging deliberately over them and then hooking your fingers into the delicate feathery insides.

When you twist your fingers, he makes a delectable strangled whimpering sound and starts moving his hand. He presses two fingers up into your nook and begins thrusting them jerkily, hopelessly out of rhythm with the way your hips are moving. Considering you’re knuckle-deep in his chest and the frantic wheezing whistle of his breath tells you he can’t actually breathe when you’ve got his gills open like this, you can’t really blame him. It feels good enough anyway if you just grind down, the heel of his palm pressing into the base of your bulge. His fingers are long and he can get them up a ways inside you - not as far as a bulge, but you take what you can get - and they’re so cold you’re hyperaware of them inside of you. Every spark of contact is that much more intense for it.

He yanks your hand out of his chest, whole body shuddering as he draws in one frantic bellows breath after another. Your fingers drip with cool blood. You smear it on his chest, over the scars that used to make him yours, until your fingers stick tackily to him. His fingers don’t stop moving in you, getting steadier with his breathing, harder as the cyanotic glaze clears from his eyes.

You feel impaled, stuck squirming on his hand while he plays you from the inside, drags you down by the hair to kiss you and drink in all the shameful babbling noise he makes you make. It gets louder and more urgent and less coherent the closer you edge to orgasm. The shitty attempt at a rhythm you’ve been clinging to falls to pieces until you’re just writhing, rutting artlessly against him, scratching and biting and tearing at every part of him you can reach. Hot anticipation winds tighter and tighter in the pit of your belly; you’re desperate to resolve it, aching with the need to finish. He keeps you circling higher and then tips you over just when it’s completely unbearable.

You shudder straight out of yourself, aware of nothing but the cold sear of his fingers in you, and come back to his claws in your scalp and teeth in your lip. You collapse against him, heart to hammering heart, while his claws skitter over your back.

The period of blissful silence is, of course, far too short. “Karkat.” He nudges you. “Get up off me.”

You consider that. You roll that thought around your pan a couple of times. “Eat shit and die,” you suggest. 

“Brother, I am all afoul with your mutant little body’s motherfucking _excretions_ and I would like to go cleanse myself up in whatever such excuse for a bathroom you can get me furnished with.” When you continue to not move, he takes you by a shoulder and rolls you off of him. “A nubbly motherfucker is welcome to make this bathing shit communal-like, if he wants to stir off his glutes.”

You contemplate the ceiling and the slowly blossoming ache in your nook. A shower sounds absolutely godly, but you’re not sure you can actually stand up. You’re going to go ahead and pin this one on a recent dearth of even halfway decent sexual partners, because that’s preferable to the idea that your celibate clown wreck of an ex-moirail is some sort of goddamn concupiscent wizard. Where the hell would he even pick it up?

As soon as visions of Terezi start dancing through your pan, you drag yourself off the couch and head for the ablution block. He must’ve fucked you stupid and now you’re delusional, that’s the only excuse.

Gamzee’s got the water temperature cranked high enough that his shoulders are scalding faintly purple, although he is by all appearances enjoying it. When you step under the spray you find it to be warm but not as warm as you like it; the mirror’s not even fogged over. “Why, for the love of whatever fake sky person is currently mosty popular, do I know so many coldbloods?”

He cocks an amused lip-curl at you. “Highbloods, brother. Don’t tell me you let them humans piss hemoanarchy in your aural flaps.”

“No, shitheel, I just came to my own separate conclusion under my own amazing brain power that, wow, maybe having a different blood color and feeling like a dead fish doesn’t make you automatically better. Not all of us can be as pleasantly unquestioning as you, you congenital fucking tragedy.” You clap him on the back hard enough to push him into the wall; he stumbles and pulls you with him. There’s a slick, scrambling moment where you think you might both fall, and then you steady yourselves, grasping appendages hooked firmly on each other.

“Let me level with you. Let me get you on the level with me, brother mine, I don’t want to jaw motherfuckin’ politics with you.” He pats the side of your face and straightens up, reaching for the soap. “Maybe at some other time can that shit all be happening, yeah?”

You’re exhausted and still riding on a wave of endorphins that are wearing just enough away to make you aware of how badly the water stings in all your myriad cuts, and trying to argue anything at all with him at _any_ point in time never made you anything but madder, but also with a headache. “Fine, sure. I’ll miss your no doubt _scintillating_ screed on how you’re naturally superior to me in every way, but I’ll manage somehow.”

He gives you back a smile with more teeth than is strictly polite. “I’ll miss whipping your slumped over motherfuckin’ ass for heresies and seditious shit, but we ain’t always be getting what we want.”

You clean yourselves up quickly and in relative silence, quietly attending to each other’s more difficult to reach wounds. By the feel of it, Gamzee made an awful mess of your back, but you laid his shoulders open pretty good yourself and he’s got some _weird_ bruising mottling his left side. About even, you figure, and you’ll have plenty of time to get him back later. 

You try not to think about burgeoning caliginous romance or blooming night flowers or anything else too soppily bullshit. So Gamzee thinks you two are meant to be together, like some pulsating blister of serendipity, in whatever quadrant you can cram yourselves into and nevermind the sane, civilized way of doing it. If you wanted Gamzee’s point of view on romance, you’d go cultivate a nice, juicy case of traumatic brain damage and write until the swelling made you pass out. This could very well be a one-time thing, would be better as a one-time thing, would be so unspeakably more intelligent as something you never even thought about doing again.

You want to rake every inch of his back down to the marrow and lick the blood off him. You have the most idiotic black crush in the history of romance. Par for the ramshackle circus of incompetence that is your life, you guess.

“Okay, come on, let’s not rack my water bill up any more exorbitantly high than it needs to be. I’ve still got to get the sopor off this morning.” You muscle him out of the way and turn it off. A brief tussle for the only towel in the block ensues, until you drop it in the two inches of cloudy water still filling the trap.

The two of you regard it mournfully. “Unclog your motherfucking drains,” Gamzee mutters finally, shouldering past you to drip into your living room. “You gotta live in a shithole, you can at least make so it’s not a broken shithole.” He flops into a bonelessly obscene sprawl across the couch.

“Screw you, my apartment is fine.” You sit next to him, not quite leaning into him. “My shower is fine. What kind of kennel is Terezi keeping _you_ in?”

He loops an arm around your shoulders, drawing you against his bony side in a parody of comfort. “Us motherfuckers share an abode,” he says, every inch the smugly condescending schoolfeed monitor. “Us motherfuckers abide together. Her digs is my digs, you dig?”

“ _Ugh_ , you’re living together? What deranged qua - no, you know, I don’t want to know, I don’t feel like projectile vomiting tonight.” Your bloodpusher’s sinking, though. Moirails live together, that’s a pale thing. That’s _such_ a pale thing. You and Gamzee used to talk about the house you’d get together, some modest little apartment, maybe near the troll side of the mixed part of town. You don’t think you can stand the thought of them sleeping happily pale-married together, not when you’ve still got his black pheromones all over you.

“Aw, Karkat,” he murmurs, voice velvet. “You couldn’t have her in none of the quadrants you want her anyway, so hush up worrying about it. We’re just doing us, you know? Girl’s the hand and I’m being the motherfucking _knife_ , that’s how it’s being. Simple as simple can be.”

“Fuck you, who says I even want her in a quadrant? She’s horrible. You two deserve each other. Go vomit your own malformed organs into each other’s gullets forever with my blessing.” You jam your elbow into his ribs. “And let go of me, you’re way too cold to cuddle.”

The awful grin he levels at you just confirms you still can’t fool him for shit. He doesn’t let go of you, either, and pulls you into a headlock when you try to push some space between the two of you. The ensuing tussle ends with you in his lap and your dignity missing in action. You decide to surrender gracefully and only accidentally elbow him in the gut twice while you shift to get comfortable.

The two of you watch awful television - there’s nothing on but staticky troll shows and ancient human reruns at this time of night - until you feel yourself starting to get drowsy. Dragging your ass up off the couch is a Herculean task at that point.

“Going to bed. Work in the morning. If you watch TV don’t make it too loud or I’ll feed you your own horns.” Unthinking, you reach out and pap his face and don’t even realize you did it until you’re halfway to your respiteblock. Mortification follows you into your recuperacoon, curling hot in your gut with you. It’s an old familiar bedmate, but you’re tired enough you only manage to hate yourself for fifteen or twenty bleary minutes before you drift asleep.

You think you maybe wake up when he slides in next to you, curling lankily around you. “Shoosh,” he whispers drowsily in your ear when you shift, and you slide seamlessly back into dreaming.


End file.
